The people of Spain think Cervantes
 Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes;
 An opinion resented most bitterly
 By the people of Italy.

Bentley’s eponymous invention, the clerihew, is one of those simple ideas that seem so natural in retrospect. Humorous biographies are nothing new, of course, but the formal structure of the clerihew lends them a certain extra something, in much the same way that the structure of a limerick predisposes the reader to expect humour, and thereby enhances that humour.

And the clerihew espouses a particularly irreverent form of humour. To begin with, the idea of summarising someone’s life in four lines already calls for a certain lack of regard, a willingness to pick out the most salient feature and satirise that. And then there are the rhymes - Nash may have lent a certain respectability to the bad rhyme, but the clerihew practically institutionalises it, to the extent that I feel slightly cheated if there isn’t at least a hint of contrivedness. And the short lines and rhyming couplets give the poem a breezy, dashed-off feel that reinforces this irreverence - a perfect contrast to the hundreds of serious (and often deadly serious) eulogies out there.

— Martin